


Aftermath

by Glinda



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Drift Compatibility, Families of Choice, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Male-Female Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-05-14 12:29:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5743879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What do you do after you saved the world? Mako and Raleigh deal with their respective losses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. These Streets

**Author's Note:**

> I started on a drabble meme, one of those stick your music player on random and use the first ten songs as prompts. Two of them prompted Pacific Rim thoughts and got a little out of hand...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The streets are too different and too similar to what Mako remembers. She'll get used to it eventually, she knows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter prompted by _These Streets_ by Paolo Nutini, as it conjoured up images of Mako in city that was both familiar and strange.

After they save the world – after they recover from their injuries and retrieve the bodies of the fallen and give them proper burials – Mako Mori has more job offers than she knows what to do with. For months she and Raleigh are at the centre of a media storm that both baffles and annoys her. They can’t get anything done, but at least they can’t get anything done together. Finishing each other’s sentences and knowing without saying a word when the other is in danger of getting overwhelmed. It had taken Stacker and her years to learn to do that for each other, to become each other’s support structure, but drifting together has given them a short circuit to that level of trust and intimacy. But then one of the main points of commonality between her and Stacker is – was – their being very private people. Neither of them had been demonstrative, they knew they cared about each other – he’d adopted her, she’d agreed to be adopted what else needed to be said? They protected each other’s privacy and respected each other’s boundaries. She’d never doubted that they would be drift compatible but had respected his reluctance to have someone else in his head. 

Raleigh is different. They know each other in a way she’s never known or been known by anyone else. They can’t hide anything from each other and it terrifies her. He takes it in his stride, but then he’s done this before. He was drift compatible with his brother and she knew they’d been close, had shared everything even before they’d shared drift space. Raleigh’s slotted her into a space in his brain marked family and carries on. She doesn’t have a precedent for this, she has no idea what he is to her now. She wants to run away from him and simultaneously cling to him and never let go. 

It breaks her heart to leave him, to tell him that they need to go their separate ways. He disagrees, but respects that she knows what she needs and eventually agrees that some time apart will probably do them both good. He makes his own plans and doesn’t ask her about hers and she tells herself that this is healthy and necessary. Their bond was built of necessity; they need to let each other go on with the rest of their lives. She needs to stop missing having him inside her head and she doesn’t know how to do that with him by her side. 

Mako takes the job in Tokyo. She needs to face her demons on her own. It takes time but she relearns the city, its highways and byways, neighbourhoods and quirks. She blends in and people respect her boundaries here. She finds colleagues and makes friends with relative ease. The constant bustle is a balm to her unquiet mind – she finds it restful, being alone in a crowd. Not even the earthquakes give her panic attacks here. It takes her the best part of year before she can face the street where she grew up on. The Kaiju did a sterling job of destroying it but it was rebuilt years before. It takes her breath away how different yet familiar it remains. She sits down hard on a bench blind-sided by how much and how little the place makes her feel. She’s proved to herself over and over this last year that she doesn’t _need_ Raleigh by her side to get by, she’s faced all her demons and she’s justifiably proud of herself, but they’ve been oddly hollow victories. None of her friends here know what those victories really mean, they don’t make sense to anyone who didn’t know her before she came here. She’s wanted to call him dozens of times to share her victories with him but the fear of dependency had stayed her hand. Here and now on the street where she grew up - where her parents died, the kaiju hunted her and Stacker rescued her – she can admit that she misses him. She doesn’t need Raleigh to hold her hand while she faces her demons, but she does want him by her side. 

When she gets home Mako finds a postcard in her mail. Raleigh has been sending her them from whatever port he washes up in, with wry observations about the place or the people or the wildlife. This one is different. Simply says that he’ll be in her neck of the woods soon and gives a rough arrival date. Her phone is in her hand and his number ringing before she entirely realises what she’s doing. He’s at sea so she knows he won’t pick up, but his voicemail still works. She hasn’t spoken a word of English in months but it flows from her tongue easily when she hears his pre-recorded voice. Her voice is calm and firm, telling him that she’s coincidentally on holiday that week and that she’ll make up the spare room for him. As though they last spoke a week ago rather than a year ago. It’s not until she’s hung up that she realises that she said your room rather than spare room in the message. She stands in the room in question, that no-one has ever slept in, with the art on the wall that she bought and was too embarrassed to take back when she got home and realised it was his taste not hers. She walks slowly round her flat, with its half-full cupboards and more space than she knows what to do with. After spending her entire adult life in either barracks or one tiny room, having a whole two-bedroom flat to herself had seemed like a decadent luxury. She understands now that she’s been subconsciously leaving space for him in every part of her life. Space for him to slot into physically once she was ready to give him back his slot in her brain. 

She’s doesn’t have the time off already and they’re ridiculously busy at work, but they always are. Her boss is reluctant to give her it at such short notice but she is implacable. Simply repeats that her best friend is coming to visit, travelling half-way across the world to see her, she has the days in hand and she needs to take them then. Her boss acquiesces when he sees she is immovable. She thanks him politely and is grateful that he doesn’t need to discover that she would have taken the days with or without his permission. Even here in Tokyo, people sometime mistake her respectfulness for obedience and Raleigh always did make her want to be disobedient. 

It takes a little research, but it quickly becomes apparent to Mako that the boat on the postcard is the one Rayleigh is travelling on. So she’s able to find out exactly when it’s due to arrive and be waiting at the harbour when it gets in. It’s a marine research boat – giant squids of all things – and despite his height and his distinctive blond hair it would be easy to miss him in the crowd. But he spots her and her umbrella waiting for him and stops dead in his tracks, surprise and delight doing battle on his features. She doesn’t remember starting forward but suddenly the distance between them is gone and they’re hugging and laughing and crying and talking over each other in a happily nonsensical mixture of Japanese and English. There will be time for apologies and explanations later but for now, nothing matters except that they’re together again. They link arms and huddle under her umbrella and they go home.


	2. Again for Greenland

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Jaeger programme took a brother from Raleigh but it gave him a sister.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt for this one was the song _Again for Greenland_ by The Paul McKenna Band, which is about an old-time whaling ship, which made me think of those Japanese 'scientific research whalers' and what sort of jobs would be available to someone with Raleigh's skills and experience outside of being a soldier. So investigating native deep sea monsters it was.

If he’d given it much thought in the last days in the Shatterdome, Raleigh would have reckoned that in the unlikely event that they survived the battle that he and Mako would be together forever. He’d lost a brother to the Jaeger programme but it had given him a sister in Mako and he’d never regret that for a moment. 

In the immediate aftermath of the battle, it was physically painful to be away from her, but he figured that was psychosomatic. A side effect of coming down from the high of drifting together and the traumatic bond of fighting and nearly dying together. It was useful in the media maelstrom that followed victory. They could read each other wordlessly and formed a tight knit unit of them against the rest of the world that made the onslaught less traumatic than it would have been for either of them alone. Everyone - military, scientific, media – seemed to want a piece of them, of Mako in particular. He might be the only still living Jaeger pilot to have piloted alone and survived but that wasn’t widely known and the rest of the surviving Jaeger pilots were keeping shtum so the main focus was on his co-pilot. Raleigh was quite happy to let her take the limelight while he held the rest of the world – metaphorically, but occasionally physically – at arms length. 

It didn’t surprise him when she wanted some space, as much as he was happy to be wherever she was he understood that she had been an only child, she wasn’t used to someone being always there the way he and Yancy had always been. She needed to stand on her own two feet and figure out who she was now that her grief was receding. It was probably healthy that they spend some time apart. Part of growing up. When he and Yancy had been teenagers they’d gone from inseparable to constant fighting and being as different from each other as the possibly could, but they’d come back together again, closer than before even. If he’d lived…well they’d have built separate lives, jobs and partners and kids, staying close but not needing to be in each other’s pockets. This was just the same sort of thing. If he was honest with himself he probably needed it more than she did after his utterly spectacular failure to cope with Yancy’s death. He’d been a Jaeger pilot and then a labourer on the wall and then a Jaeger pilot again all his adult life, he needed to figure out what he was going to do now that there wasn’t a war on. The world was falling over itself to give her a job – and rightly so, he’d been a fully paid up member of her fan club since he met her, he was glad to see the rest of the world cotton on to her awesomeness – but him, not so much. 

In the end he signs up to work the boats. The clean up work in the Pacific has come up with all sorts of interesting discoveries about the strange and wonderful indigenous species of the ocean. Suddenly the nations of the world have a vested interest in making sure they know what’s down there. There are dozens of scientific expeditions mapping and exploring the world’s oceans. They need divers and scientists, but the also need crews for the boats and lots of people are understandably reluctant to get on boats. Raleigh is strong and smart and has survived everything that the ocean has thrown at him so far. He signs up. Just not for the Pacific. 

The Atlantic Ocean doesn’t feel like running away until Mako – swithering for weeks between offers in Berlin and Toronto – decides to move back to Tokyo. He was going to be based out of Nuuk in Greenland and he’d been hoping she’d decide on Berlin because while he’d be looking at an 18 hours of flights in either direction at least from Berlin they could meet half-way in Reykjavik. He’s proud of her for going back there, he of all people knows just how many demons she’ll be facing down just being in that city for a prolonged period again. He just wishes he were going with her, not to hold her hand while she faces her demons, but to be a shoulder to lean on in the aftermath. But he accepts that that’s his issue, tells himself that he’s just afraid that she’ll be as indestructible without him as they were together. He’ll cope. 

(He survived Yancy dying inside his brain. If he survived that then he can survive anything.)

They hug goodbye and get on separate flights at the airport. It’s a good plan, because an hour into his epic flight he’s curled in a ball in his seat, forcing his breaths calm, assuring himself that the pain he’s feeling is psychosomatic. It’s the first time he’s been this far from his co-pilot since they met of course he feels like he’s missing a limb. He’s just glad he’s not on a land based form of transportation, because he knows if he were he’d be turned around and heading back to her instantly. He can get through this; he will. 

Raleigh tells himself it’s a good thing when he calls her on arrival in Nuuk and gets voicemail. It lets him compose himself and leave her a cheery message about arriving safely. He can even joke about feeling like he’s missing a limb. As soon as he’s off the phone, in the quiet of the dorm, he curls around the phone like a life buoy and lets him self cry out some of his grief. It’s more like a chunk of his torso he’s lost than a limb. 

He wakes in the morning and finds a voicemail in return. Mako sounds jetlagged but happy. She’s missing a limb of her own and that starts their joke of referring to each other as right arm and left arm. They rarely speak directly, he sends her postcards and she leaves him voicemails. It’s somehow easier that way. 

~

It turns out that actually he really enjoys his job. The mixture of hard physical labour and the need for quick thinking in perilous situations is right in his skill set. The long periods of waiting followed by intense action are familiar enough to be comforting and different enough to be distracting. In the quiet of the open ocean, with only the chug of the engine and the call of birds to distract him, Raleigh learns to be at peace with the silence inside his own head. The empty places inside his head where Yancy and Mako once stood begin to scab over, to heal a little. 

They make all kinds of fascinating discoveries. The only monsters they find are native to those waters, basking sharks and blue whales – they see the sucker marks of giant squid on the sides of these giants but they never come across a flesh and blood example. Raleigh can’t decide if he’s disappointed or relieved about that. 

By the time his stint is almost up, missing Mako has receded to be more like the phantom limb they joke about, no longer the sucking chest wound of those early days. He contemplates signing up for another stint until one of the marine biologists mentions that he’s heading off to the Western Pacific to join an expedition following up on more credible Giant Squid sightings. The thought briefly scares Raleigh, witless, which he jokes to his colleague is a sure sign he needs to do it. He ignores the little voice that whispers ‘closer to Mako, closer to home’. He’s come a long way from Anchorage and there’s nothing left for him there. 

~  
Lots of the crew come from the island nations of the North Atlantic so they make drop offs along the way back. Raleigh had been looking forward to spending time in Reykjavik again, but when the tail end of a hurricane causes them to linger in the Orkneys he discovers he can get a flight from there to Bergen in Norway. Bergen where, for reasons unknown, both Geiszler and Gottlieb have both washed up. The thought of spending time with anyone from the Jaeger programme is warming for the first time in a long time so he follows the instinct and heads for Norway. 

The two scientists argue constantly. They snipe and snark and…finish each other’s sentences. Raleigh’s never encountered two people who could be both so combative and so co-dependant at once. He’d forgotten that they’d drifted together – albeit with a kaiju, but nonetheless he supposes that would have bound them pretty closely. He’s avoided alcohol for months, unwilling to let his guard down around anyone else without anyone (Mako) to watch his back. But these two understand, he doesn’t have to pretend, they won’t think its weird how much he misses Mako. Several drinks in and it emerges that they’re more weirded out by how much he and Mako don’t miss each other. They’re an odd mixture of baffled and resentful that Raleigh and Mako can cope with being half the world away from each other yet the two of them get twitchy when the other is at a conference in another country for a week or more. The relief that what he feels is normal nearly overwhelms Raleigh but he manages to joke lightly about missing a limb. 

“Screw missing a limb,” exclaims Newton, “it’s like someone ripped out part of my brain and my chest and walked off with it!”

“I once,” Hermann continues, voice oddly quiet and calm after Newton’s outburst, “navigated across Chicago – where I’d never been before – to where _he_ was based on how much it hurt or didn’t hurt to walk one way or the other. We don’t even like each other. You and Mako fit together like puzzle pieces before you even drifted…”

Newton picks up where he’d left off, baffled and sad, “how can you even breathe?”

“It hurts,” Raleigh forces out past his teeth and his pride, “constantly but I figured it was a side effect from what happened with Yancy. Mako’s doing fine – you both said you’d seen her and she was fine – I thought I just needed time to…to heal.”

Hermann stomps off muttering about stubborn soldiers and other people being even more emotionally stunted than him. Newton’s voice is strangely gentle when he speaks again. “Go home Raleigh. Stop pretending you’re okay and let her admit that she isn’t either. You both sacrificed a lot to save the world, you’re allowed something for yourselves now.”

~

The ache has receded back to a manageable level by the morning and Raleigh has responsibilities, he can’t just drop everything and go to Tokyo to take their advice. Still, he makes a postcard from a picture of the research boat, checks that Tokyo will be one of their stopping ports and writes the expected date on it for her. He tells the captain his sister works in Tokyo, that he’ll be wanting some leave there and his voice doesn’t catch on the words nor does the captain blink at the request. It’s not a strange request, its perfectly normal to miss family when you work away. 

He’s fully prepared to use Hermann’s trick to track her down when he arrives in Tokyo but he looks up when he gets ashore and sees her waiting under her umbrella like no time has passed at all. It takes his breath away for a moment until she catches his eyes and throws dignity to the wind and suddenly they’re hugging and laughing and the ache in his chest (in his bones, in his brain, a constant grinding pain) that he’s almost forgotten was there disappears. He worries about how he’s going to fit into her life here but it turns out she’s been making spaces for him all along. A room in her flat – though they spend the first night on her sofa curled like kittens - space in her cupboards, they slot together like it hasn’t been a year apart. 

The Jaeger programme took his brother from him but it gave him a sister in return and while they don’t need to be together constantly, they prefer to be. 

It’s easier to leave when you know you can come home again.


End file.
